


Beautiful Handsome Bones

by Catherss



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Child Abuse, Childhood, Drunkenness, FTM, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Growing Up, HRT, Hate Crimes, Homophobia, Kidlock, LGBT Themes, NHS, Neglect, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past, Present Tense, Teenlock, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Translock, Transphobia, Transphobic Attack, binding, ftm!Sherlock, unsafe binding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2014-09-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 19:23:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2359439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherss/pseuds/Catherss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>""See, Willamina, it looks good on you. I don't know why you don't wear dresses more."<br/>"Yes, mother." He replies, his forced voice wrongfully high, hands soothing over the front of it in a way that suggests not an urge to keep it neat but an urge to get it off his skin."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beautiful Handsome Bones

**Author's Note:**

> This starts around early July, when Sherlock is 15. Mycroft is in his second year of university.
> 
> Thank you Alex (tillthewheelsfalloff) for beta'ing - you're rad!

He stands between his mother and Mycroft as his father’s politically powerful friend comes round the drive in his cream coloured Bentley.

She glances at him and smiles; she's genuinely happy despite his discomfort and his pain and how his fists ball at his sides (she doesn't see that, though - she sees a smile and a pretty girl in front of her). "See, Willamina, it looks good on you. I don't know why you don't wear dresses more."

"Yes, mother." He replies, his forced voice wrongfully high, hands soothing over the front of it in a way that suggests not an urge to keep it neat but an urge to get it off his skin.  
  
\---

He stands in front of the mirror. It's 2:38 AM. It's cold and dark outside but the fire of his hate burns him from the inside out.

He pulls his t-shirt over his head and hates his wide hips and narrow waist, his chest and his skinny shoulder and his thighs, smooth throat and curved jaw and his long hair. His hands itch at his side. He wants to pull off this soft skin and plaster on something new. His body is transport, he repeats to himself, transport, transport, transport, but he cannot make it feel true.

He didn't know how long he stood in front of the mirror, picking out the flaws, but when he collapsed onto his bed he fell asleep curled up into himself.  
  
\--- 

"Willa. You need to eat."

He would, oh, he would, but when he's gaunt the misplaced feeling starts to fade into a background hum rather than an ever present scream.

He tucks the violin back under his chin and places the bow on the C string. Mycroft sighs and stands to leave.  
  
\---  
  
Mycroft is downtown at the moment – something about filing a complaint with the bank, he wasn't really listening – so he sneaks into his brother’s bedroom.

It's clean, organised, clutter free, with an ornate double size bed in the middle. A desk facing the window, a wardrobe facing the door, a packed bookshelf in the corner, a chest of drawers. He goes to that first, sliding open the top drawer, noting how the clothes were laying so he could put them back after before lifting up the first, pastel blue shirt first on the pile. It was slightly too small on Mycroft, and he often wore it causally with a polo tee underneath.

He takes off his jumper, slips on the shirt and starts buttoning it up over his vest. He takes a tie - navy, with the red England Rugby rose emblem, gifted to him by an uncle who felt obliged to give them something every Christmas but had never seen either of them in the flesh. He loops it around his neck - with a lurch he realises he doesn't know how to tie it even though he's observed Mycroft do it time and time again.

He opens up the wardrobe and pulls out a blazer, puts that on too, then tucks his hair up and puts it under a bowler hat, and inspects himself in the mirror.

He can still pick out the flaws even the unobservant general public could pick out - the bumps on his chest where he bound with a sheet he tore into strips, the narrow, smooth plain of his neck - but it's a start.  
  
\---  
  
He lifts up a buzzing razor to his hair.

Tears are blurring his eyes as he tries to calm the unstoppable storm of thoughts, barrelling through his mind faster than he can stop them. But it's like trying to calm a tsunami and he can't do this any more, masquerade as something he isn't.

He jerks forward, body shaking as he silently sobs, one hand by his side, one in his hair. Time passes and he looks up at his reflection; his ocean eyes drowning.

The tears stop. He makes an incredibly lucid decision.

Hair pools around his feet and his mother drops a plate when she sees, and Mycroft just smirks like he knew all along, the _bastard_ , but he's finally kick-started something, something revolutionary.  
  
\---

He's in his room, quietly plucking at the strings of his violin and doesn't hear the footsteps until they're outside his door.

It opens to reveal his father, his bloodshot eyes staring at Sherlock with anger, resolution and what Sherlock realises is drunken hate.

He picks up the violin bow off Sherlock’s bed and brings it up, then down, across his cheek. The wood splinters but doesn't snap. His hand goes to his face, tenderly touching where his father struck him.

"What are you? A _dyke_? A _faggot_?" His father whispers.

Sherlock makes a broken noise in the back of this throat, staring up at the man he thought loved him, eyes wide and his heart thundering.

His father kicks his bed, then leaves, slamming the door behind him. Sherlock stays as he was for minutes after, until he lies down, violin on one side and the broken bow on the other.

\---

 

"Mention last night to your mother or Mycroft and I will skin you." His father says over a newspaper.

Sherlock tenses, nods, and feels like maybe he should say something, but he doesn't at all think his father wasn't capable of his threat if he so wished to go through with it. He stands to leave and when he gets upstairs to his bedroom with eyes wet enough to just on the verge of tears he collapses onto his bed, pulls the cover over himself and weeps for all he didn't have.

\---  
  
Mycroft sits him down in the conservatory three days later, when father is working and mother in the garden. He pulls out an opaque plastic bag and hands it too him.

"You'll crush your ribs if you carry on like this." He says, glancing down to his chest.

His face burns but he takes the bag anyways, thankful.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Think of it as a gift," he replies, "from me to my brother."  
  
\---  
  
"Willamina, _please_ stop this!" His mother cries, one hand over her mouth and another reaching forward to his face, fingers out stretched **.**

He jerks away. " _Sherlock_ , mother, my name is Sherlock now."

"Willamina, you're upsetting your mother." His father interjects, pseudo-calm, as he raises his hand to his mothers back.

Sherlock looks between them both, mouth open, close to tears. "She's upsetting me! This is who I want to be!"

"You're a young _woman_ , Willa - please, act like it!" His mother whispers, as if she had any right to be broken with her daughter - son - in front of her.

Mycroft inhales. "Mother, _please_."

His father slams a hand down onto the table. "No! Mycroft, she's just confused! She will get over it soon - it's just a _phase_!"

Mycroft glances over to Sherlock, who is crying silently, hands at his side, curled into tight balls. He tugs him over into a hug, and Sherlock buries his head into the crook of his neck, body vibrating with the sobs.

Mycroft throws a disappointed look over Sherlock’s shoulder at his parents, who are trying to console each other. Mycroft only grips Sherlock harder.  
  
\---  
  
On the second of September, he sits in his English Literature class - absurdly dull, but his father threatened to take away his lab kit if he started skipping lessons - with his hands on the table, nervously awaiting the register as a boy next to him rests his head on the table and Sherlock can tell from his breathing that he's going to fall asleep soon if not woken.

A new teacher sat at the desk - he immediately noticed a small indent around her finger where a wedding ring should have recently been, and filed that away to ask Mycroft about - and went through the names one by one, looking up after every "yes, miss" to try and place faces to names.

"Sherlock Holmes?" His fingers stop picking at the cuticle on his thumb.

"Yes, miss."  
Later on that lesson, as they were doing some basic analysis on Macbeth, a boy addresses him as she and Willa so he takes his book and refuses to give it back until he addresses him properly and the boy gets detention for not having done any work and Sherlock realises that this year, he will have to choose between being accepted and being outcasted.

 

\---  
  
Mycroft has a suitcase by his feet.

"Don't go." Sherlock whispers, one hand on Mycrofts sleeve, "don't leave me with them."

Mycroft swallows. "It's only until Christmas. Then I'll be back."

Sherlock lets go of his sleeve, nodding. "Okay," he replies, then stronger: "alright."  
  
\---  
  
"I think I'm going crazy," Sherlock whispers down the line to Mycroft. "They keep calling me Willa, and she. I can't do it anymore," he swallows, head bowed.

"Oh, Sherlock..." Mycrofts distorted sigh came down the line. "Listen. I'll book an appointment for you at a gender centre. You can get therapy-"

Sherlock freezes, and then explodes. "What, so I can stop being such a fucking _freak_?" He hisses. "I expected _better_ from you!"

"Sherlock, no! You need therapy to get hormones. They do tests, and make sure you're certain. You have to wait six months."

"I _am_ certain."

Mycroft sighed again. "I'm sorry, Sherlock. Just play the game."  
  
\---  
  
Sherlock sits in the waiting room of London's GIC, slouched, fingers drumming on the leather armrest.

"Willa, close your legs, you're sitting like a _wh_ -" His mother hisses at him, cutting her self off with a exhale, glancing away and clutching a handbag like it was the only sane thing in the building.

Sherlock glances up at her with a bored expression (even though his heart was tattooing his ribs and his stomach felt like it was burning through his body) shifts his legs wider apart. A black, punk, slightly androgynous male teenager around his age sitting across from him bites back a smile. They simultaneously glance at each other and Sherlock flashes the person a quick grin.

"Sorry, who's Willa?" Sherlock asks innocently. "Unless it's that kid over there."

He gestures to the teenager, who looks at his mother straight faced and replies, to Sherlocks reply, in a north Irish accent, "sorry, miss. I'm Rowan - no Willa here."

His mother narrows her eyes at them before huffing and turning her head away. The two teenagers share a victory snigger.

"Sherlock Holmes?" The receptionist pipes up. "Doctor Dasgupta will see you now."

The kid gives him a thumbs up and another grin, to which Sherlock mirrors nervously.

 

\---

 

"Pease, Willa! Just for one day, just to make grandmother happy!"

Sherlock shakes his head.

"We'll take away your lab equipment."

He shakes his head.

"We'll stop you calling Mycroft when he goes back to university."

He shakes his head. "No. Men don't wear dresses, mother."

"But you're not a _man_ ," his father hisses.

Sherlock balks at the statement and feels the pressure from the air increase.  
  
\---  
  
He's in a park, watching the sunset - how very romantic, he can almost hear Mycroft say - when three boys pass him, hoods up and swaggering slightly.

He pays them no heed but one of them noticed him and hits his friends arm lightly.

"Hey, it's Willa, the tranny!"

Sherlock bristles and shoves his hands into his trouser pockets. The boys round to him.

"Hey, dyke. What you doing?"

"Sitting here." Sherlock replies carefully. 

"Funny." One boy spits. He backhands him, leaving Sherlock stunned. It had come out of nowhere - he wasn't doing anything!

The three other boys roared with laughter. "What are you gonna do? Be a girl about it?" They drag him onto his feet roughly, not giving him time to reply. He can smell alcohol on their breath and clothes.

"I dunno, Matt - it says it's a he." He grins maliciously. "Maybe we should check."

Sherlock chokes in horror, and tries to pull away from the boy who has him in his grasp. The boy punches him, hard, in the gut, winding him, and he collapses onto his knees.

One other boy kicks him in the chest, forcing him back as the other two kneel over him, the light from the dying sun dancing across their faces and catching in their hair.  
He squirms away, but the boys pin him down at his hips and shoulders. The boy who acted first straddled his stomach and pulled the jumper he was wearing up to reveal pale, bare skin.

He pushed his hands up under his the polo tee he was wearing, stopping at the binder. "What the _fuck_ is this?" He asked, tugging at it. Sherlock was silent from how helpless he felt, the flight-or-fight adrenaline pumping through his veins making it impossible to reply.

The boy lifts his jumper from under him and the other boys aided him in getting it off. Sherlock started to struggle again, and tried call for help but his mouth was clamped closed by a palm that extended over his mouth pushing up against his jaw. His breaths forced out in ragged sets, in, out, in out, as the roaming hands made his skin burn.

"Hey!" A voice from off from his side.

"Fuck off, man, you don't know about this shit."

The voice pauses, before suddenly kicking the boy straddling Sherlock in the chest, hard, pushing him off his body. The two boys holding him down scramble away as Sherlock stands, automatically going into a loose fighting stance despite his trembling hands. One boy tries to lunge for him, but he manages a cross to his jaw. The boy stumbles backwards, his tongue visibly roaming his mouth.

"I'm bleeding," he says in surprise.

Collectively, the three boys seem to make the decision to bolt - what the other person was doing at the time, Sherlock didn't know - and Sherlock sunk to the ground, shaking and fighting back tears as the adrenaline wore off.

"You okay?" He finally gets a good look at the person.

It was the kid from the GIC.

"Yeah, thanks." He embraces his legs and tightly balls his body, panting slightly.

The boy sinks down next to him, putting a backpack next to him. "Rowan." He holds out his hand to shake. His frizzy hair was catching the light, but it was somehow far warmer than when it captured by the three boys.

"Sherlock." They shake hands.

"Listen, do you need to go to ER?" 

"No, they didn't hurt me." The kid hums, sitting cross legged. Sherlock turns to him. "Why were you out here?"

"I dunno. I like walking at sunset. It's kind of relaxing." He grins. "Good thing I found you though, right?"

Sherlock doesn't want to think about what would have happened if he hadn't.  
  
\---  
  
They talk for a long while after that with their hands shoved into their jumper and gilet respectively. Sherlock knows he should get home, but it felt like a disconnect to then go back to his family, his parents, after that. He could feel the imprints of the hands on his chest and belly. He was shaking still and had almost started crying at one point, which Rowan ignored politely.

It's freezing. The streetlight behind them highlights their cloudy breath - in, out, in, out - and lights Rowans bone structure just so. 

"Listen," says Rowan, running a hand through his hair. "Let me give you my phone number. Call me, alright? This world isn't ready for people like us. We gotta stick together."  
Sherlock takes the number, written on a bit of paper pulled out of the backpack and shoves it in his pocket.  
  
\---

He arrives back at home at 4:08 to an empty house. No one had waited up for him.  
  
\---  
  
In the morning, he wakes at 12:49 and nobody asks where he was. Nobody asks what time he got in. Nobody asks why he slept in so late.  
  
\---  
  
The night after that, he wakes, in a cold sweat and panting slightly, tangled up in his blankets. The nightmares starts to fade, but he can remember two details vividly:

1\. Rowan was there, and they were very, very, close.

2\. Rowan was not there, and Rowan did not stop them, and they did not stop.

He turns over and kicks off his sheets but doesn't get to sleep again for an hour.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I decided not to have Sherlock skip any years - while he would have no doubt been intelligent enough to do so, I don't really think he cared enough about school to bother with the extra work to skip a year. I think he would have very much so just went through it, probably didn't do any homework, and generally kept his head down.
> 
> By the way, if he seems at all out of character, I'd like to just mention that when the fanfiction is set, he's no where near the cold, distant person he will become - he's currently in a very unstable emotional state and there's a lot of pressure on him from his parents and society to, in his words, "stop being such a fucking freak."
> 
> There's still three more chapters to come, but when they will, I'm not sure. Thank you for reading!


End file.
